Krystal A. Smalls

Krystal A. Smalls serves as Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology within the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She maintains cross-appointments as Associate Professor in African American Studies, Linguistics, and the Center for African Studies, reflecting her transdisciplinary research approach.

Her educational background includes a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania (2015) and a BS from Cornell University (2000). Her research program examines how young people in Black communities create meaning through discourse and practice, with particular attention to digital spaces and urban environments across the African diaspora.

Smalls' research interests focus on linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and cultural anthropology with emphasis on race, semiotics, digital space, personhood, gender, discourse, language ideology, hip hop, migration, and African diaspora communities (particularly Liberia and the US). Her work specifically investigates discourses and practices that constitute Black life, Blackness, antiblackness, and anti-antiblackness through ethnographic research in various Black diaspora locations.

Her recent publications demonstrate a consistent analytical trajectory examining how language practices function as public refusals of antiblack raciolinguistic ideologies. The 2024 monograph Telling Blackness represents a significant theoretical contribution to raciosemiotics, while subsequent articles explore digital subjectivity, corporeal representation in memes, and the semiotic production of Black femininities.

Smalls has conducted extensive fieldwork with young urbanites in Monrovia, Liberia and Philadelphia, PA, and is developing new research with the Gullah Geechee community of coastal South Carolina. Her methodological approach combines ethnographic observation with critical discourse analysis to examine how talk, movement, and digital communication constitute meaningful acts within racialized contexts.